Right-wing media turns to Supreme Court after democratic socialist wave

Despite widespread media coverage to the contrary, this week’s elections in New York did not remake the Democratic Party. But the reaction to them offers a clear window into how the right is preparing for the battles ahead — not primarily at the ballot box, but in the courts, and not only over policy, but over the very definition of the electorate itself. The response illustrates how seamlessly conservative media has fused attacks on democratic socialism with one of its central narratives of the Trump era: the great replacement theory. 

Three candidates backed by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist whose upset election last year dramatically reshaped New York politics, prevailed in Democratic congressional primaries. Former New York City Comptroller Brad Lander defeated incumbent Rep. Dan Goldman in Manhattan and Brooklyn’s 10th Congressional District. In the 13th District, community and union organizer Darializa Avila Chevalier unseated the veteran establishment figure Rep. Adriano Espaillat. State assembly member Claire Valdez won decisively in the open seventh District. Because all three districts are overwhelmingly Democratic, each is heavily favored to win in November.

Those victories reinforced what has become increasingly difficult to dismiss: Mamdani’s own election was not simply an isolated upset. Democratic Socialists of America-backed candidates continue building influence in New York while making gains in cities across the country. They have won city council seats in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Minneapolis, Portland and San Antonio. In Washington, D.C., DSA-backed Janeese Lewis George captured the Democratic mayoral nomination. Seattle elected self-described democratic socialist Katie Wilson as mayor. In Los Angeles, DSA member Nithya Raman advanced to the mayoral runoff.

The broader trend reflects years of organizing by progressive groups including the Democratic Socialists of America, Justice Democrats and Our Revolution. These organizations have become increasingly sophisticated in recruiting candidates, raising money, mobilizing volunteers and challenging incumbents.

But that reality is not quite the revolutionary political earthquake portrayed by either enthusiastic leftists or alarmed conservatives.

Only two sitting Democratic members of Congress lost renomination this cycle. Progressives won several open-seat primaries in states including New York, Texas, Pennsylvania and New Jersey, while advancing in California. Yet left-wing candidates also suffered notable defeats. In Illinois, establishment-backed Democrats easily repelled progressive challengers in high-profile statewide and congressional races where the DSA declined to even offer endorsements. Establishment-backed Democrats comfortably won New York’s comptroller primary and prevailed in the state’s most competitive Republican-held House district. 

The picture is mixed rather than transformative. 

Nevertheless, conservative media portrayed Tuesday’s elections as evidence that the Democratic Party has been completely overtaken by radical socialism. To sustain this pitch of existential terror, right-wing media has spent the days following the primary digging into the past statements of the victorious candidates to construct a composite monster that can be tied to the broader Democratic brand ahead of the 2028 presidential election. 

In this effort, Chevalier’s since-deleted social media posts from the early 2020s, in which she referred to the United States as a “f**king disgrace,” called Joe Biden a “war criminal” and boasted about using an American flag as a napkin, have become an invaluable asset to right-wing media. Other past statements — including advocating for a world completely devoid of borders and police, and declaring that Israel “doesn’t exist” — have been replayed on a loop across conservative networks.

Where candidate backgrounds do not provide immediate fodder, right-wing media has proven more than willing to stoop to venomous personal attacks. When discussing Brad Lander’s victory, the rhetoric veered into anti-semitism. On Newsmax, Republican gubernatorial candidate Bruce Blakeman, operating with an explicit endorsement from Trump, labeled Lander a Nazi. “He’s a disgrace,” Blakeman said. “He’s anti-American, he is anti-Semitic, even though he’s Jewish. This guy would be a camp guard in a concentration camp if he could.” Hours later, Ben Shapiro offered his own variation on the theme, baselessly claiming to his Daily Wire audience that Lander only “calls himself a Jew so that he doesn’t have to call himself a white guy.” 

Republicans are already signaling that figures like Mamdani and his allies will be used as symbols of the Democratic Party as a whole, regardless of the party’s internal diversity. The goal is to nationalize a set of local races and frame them as representative of a radical shift.

President Donald Trump quickly embraced that narrative. Posting on Truth Social, Trump declared that he had been preparing for the return of communists “for a long time.” At a Friday speech in Washington, Trump framed the upcoming midterm elections as a contest between Republicans and “communists.” Attacking Mamdani’s rent freeze, he warned that apartment buildings would become “ghettos and slums” because landlords were effectively having their property confiscated.

Fox News personalities amplified the same message all week. Across multiple programs, hosts asserted that the election results reflected immigration rather than ideology.

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“This is what happens when you import the third world,” Jesse Watters declared, describing New York’s primary results as “a third world takeover.” Laura Ingraham similarly connected progressive politics with foreignness rather than domestic political preferences. “The entire lead-up to July 4, I consider it one big trigger warning to the Mamdani minions,” she scoffed. “They’re happiest when foreign flags are flying. Because to them, red, white, and blue . . . is like sunshine to a vampire.”

Steve Bannon echoed the theme on his “War Room” podcast, calling New York a “foreign city.”

“Go look at Mamdani’s base,” Bannon told listeners. “It’s foreign. These sanctuary cities — this is all by design.” Daily Wire commentator Matt Walsh dispensed with subtlety altogether. “Third world communists are the enemy,” he wrote on X. “They’ve taken over our greatest American city. They’re taking over one of our two major political parties. They hate this country. They hate white people. They hate our heritage and traditions.”

The danger of this commentary lies in its explicit de-legitimization of the democratic process itself. When a citizen votes for a candidate who happens to hold democratic socialist views, conservative media treat the voter as an illegal interloper whose very participation in the franchise is a form of national contamination. And they’ve turned to the nation’s highest court as a counter-majoritarian shield, framing an ordinary shift in municipal politics as an existential emergency that justifies the legal dismantling of a century of constitutional consensus.

No figure articulated that connection more explicitly than White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, a central architect of Trump’s immigration agenda.

In a series of posts following Tuesday’s results, Miller declared that Democrats had “imported a new electorate.” Appearing later on on Sean Hannity’s Fox News program, Miller told viewers that “a vote for any Democrat anywhere for any office is empowering a party that wants to strip this country to the bone.” This is the kind of overheated language that has become so normalized on right-wing television that it barely registers as remarkable. “Half of college graduates in New York City are either foreign born or come from immigrant households,” Miller told Fox’s Will Cain. “We have completely changed New York City. New York is not the New York seen in movies or the one you visited as a kid.” He continued by arguing that the financial future of New York and Los Angeles was “controlled in large measure by people that we just brought into this country who have no history or experience or faith or competence in any case in American democracy.”

This is the backbone of the great replacement theory — the conspiratorial belief that political elites are intentionally replacing native-born Americans with immigrants who will reshape the nation’s politics and culture. The reaction to New York’s elections demonstrated how thoroughly that narrative has become embedded within conservative media. There is a feedback loop at work. Progressive victories provoke alarmist coverage, which in turn reinforces the sense among conservative audiences that the country is slipping away. That sense of loss fuels support for more aggressive interventions, particularly through the courts.

Within the same news cycle as these election results, conservatives turned their attention to a series of favorable Supreme Court rulings for the Trump administration on immigration policy. A 6–3 decision allowing the continuation of certain border restrictions was celebrated not simply as a legal victory, but also as a cultural one. The right’s reaction to these rulings exposed the raw ethno-nationalist impulses driving the judicial pivot. 

On her podcast, Megyn Kelly delivered a celebratory monologue directly linking the Court’s decisions on Temporary Protected Status to the broader cultural panic over national identity. “Look, this has been going on for over a dozen years,” Kelly said of the migrant populations affected by the rulings. “Go home, get out! We know our country is better than yours! That’s because we filled it with our work ethic and our culture and our values! You being here only dilutes it for us, those who built it and live it!” In an unvarnished outburst that captured the emotional core of the great replacement narrative, Kelly added, “And half of you people, more than half, you won’t assimilate! We don’t want you! We don’t care if you’re offended. Get out! Go home! Go back to f**king Haiti!” Moments later, she mused about why the U.S. could not instead attract immigrants from European nations like Norway, who “do their row thing” during the World Cup, illustrating a vision of American citizenship defined entirely by racial homogeneity.

The anticipation surrounding the upcoming Court decision on birthright citizenship fits squarely into this framework. For more than a century, the 14th Amendment has guaranteed citizenship to anyone born on U.S. soil. The amendment was originally ratified in the wake of the Civil War specifically to overrule the infamy of the Dred Scott decision. The Trump administration’s effort to reinterpret that guarantee — excluding children of undocumented immigrants — has long been considered a legal long shot. But in the current climate, it has taken on outsized symbolic importance. For many on the right, it represents a way to redraw the boundaries of national belonging through judicial power rather than electoral competition.

This is why the reaction to the New York primaries so quickly converged on the courts. If cities are “lost,” if the electorate is “changed,” then the judiciary becomes the arena where outcomes can still be controlled. It is a shift from campaigning for votes to limiting who gets to cast them. The right-wing media ecosystem is making an argument, in real time, that the solution to democratic elections producing outcomes conservatives dislike is to ensure that fewer of the people who voted in them are legally recognized as citizens.

Right-wing media’s decision to reach for replacement theory instead of grappling with the policy arguments is, in its own way, an admission of weakness. The question now is what happens to a political system when one side increasingly treats unfavorable election results as illegitimate by definition. If victories can always be attributed to “imported” voters, then the incentive to compete within the system — and eventually the system itself — diminishes.